MORE ADDED (also read the COMMENTS) – UWAASA recently asked its members to let us know about the untoward (perhaps unexpected) effects of the centralisation procedures of Renewal. Some responses have been summarised here and the Committee will forward them on to the Executive and relevant bodies (e.g. ACC). Please feel free to send your contributions to uwaasa@uwa.edu.au
• Staff are still waiting for leave taken in early January to be approved. In my case, the approver used to be my head of school. Now it is recorded as an IT Systems Support Officer – for a Level E position! Clearly an error, but still not fixed although the error was registered a long time ago.
• We are doing a wide range of admin tasks ourselves – we don’t know how to do most of them or to whom to turn for help any more. The financial tasks are the worse. Admin staff around us are snowed under and I have seen some close to breaking point on occasion. We try and do ourselves what we can – often it takes many, many times longer than it would for someone familiar with the task, and we don’t always do it correctly.
• One of my academic staff has waited a month to get an account acquitted and has been told it will take at least another month due to the workload of the admin staff involved.
• The one admin task that I used to do has been taken away from me! I used to be able to run Peoplesoft reports. Now I have to request them from Financial Services.
• My admin staff are saying that their new JDFs have been “dumbed down” into generic statements that do not reflect the intricacies of their roles. Moreover, it is impossible to draw role boundaries with the JDFs as they stand. There is no reporting relation mentioned in their JDF, including who their immediate manager is.
THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO RESPOND. WE ARE HEARING MANY SIMILAR STORIES.
My schools it support used to be serviced by the business school.they used to be able to fix things on my computer remotely. now with the new centralised service delivery centre they don’t have the same it tools as the business school so they actually have to walk to my office to fix problems, but the delay time can be a problem in terms of where my incident is in the queue. ie time wasted waiting for my computer to be fixed. Why does the business school have such a better system or has the business schools system been centralised as well and they’ve lost the capabilities they used to have.
i don’t know if this is related, was the new look of uwa’s website part of renewal?
if not this is just a general complaint
has anybody else had a look at our website? it is awful! i feel awful looking at it, moving images, difficulty in finding information, the homepage is directed at students but i am sure even the students would find it difficult to navigate.
i also tried to find out what sort of research is being done at uwa but the links all have obscure titles so it is hard to work out. furthermore, the webpage with all of last years wonderful research success stories is a moving sea of words and images that are almost impossible to pin down. who wrote these websites and thought they were good for anyone to read?
on the page where it supposedly gives links to discipline related research it is just a link to a faculty list.
Try finding out about what teaching awards are available across the campus. there is no central page with each schools teaching awards. Why not?
How do students, or academics for that matter, find out what teaching awards are available.
our teaching is meant to be improving and it is meant to be improving with support. teaching awards are a way of supporting quality teaching but why can’t we find out about them?
All these comments are being passed on to the Executive.